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If you saw Steven Spielberg’s culturally cannibalistic revision of a key scene from The Shining in this year’s Ready Player One, it’s time to return to the original. After 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick made a new, alien vision of remote madness, this time born of boredom, white power and the nuclear family. Jack Nicholson plays a father driven to violence by the spirits possessing an icy hotel built on the site of a massacre. His psychic son foresees it all, but of course, adults never listen. In any case, there’s maternal victory to be found by Shelley Duvall’s tenacious, vulnerable wife character. A reminder that as a genre, horror exists beyond exploitative slasher silliness, and a true screen classic.

Sing Street (Ireland, 2016) by John Carney – 9 July

The Shining has lost its shine – Kubrick was slumming it in a genre he despised

A fine teen coming-of-age film in which an ingenious dork invents a “futurist” pop band as an excuse to hang out with the cool older girl across the road. As I wrote in a previous Stream Lover: “Despite its themes of the tyranny of high school and the grimness of working-class life in 1980s Dublin, Sing Street is tuned to youthful vivacity. It’s the type of film that blends an indie ethos and a big commercial audience sensibility ... approaching the hopes and longing of youth from the prism of maturity.”

Yes, it’s a terrible film. But what a great terrible film it is. Hollywood doesn’t make sticky, syrupy romcoms like this anymore: Sally (Sandra Bullock) and Gillian (Nicole Kidman) are witchy sisters in Massachusetts, cursed by family lore from ever finding lasting romance. When they accidentally kill and reanimate Gillian’s bad boyfriend, they also have to evade a lawman who could buck the curse to become Sally’s true love. A ridiculous plotline! It is carried out with real commitment and buoyed by the dream acting duo of Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest as the sisters’ eccentric, supernatural aunts.

The film that started as a drag-racing B movie now combines with espionage and heists in one of commercial film-making’s biggest, most diverse franchises. My pick of the bunch is 2015’s Furious 7, directed by James Wan. Not only does the franchise’s friendship theme resound with the incorporation of star Paul Walker’s death into the storyline (especially with the cheesy, wonderful montage commemorating him towards the film’s end), the scale and imagination of the film’s action sequences are second to none: cars fly across skyscrapers, fall through clouds out of fighter planes and slide underneath semitrailers. At their best, The Fast and the Furious films are bouncy, weightless studio entertainment.

Stan

The Handmaiden review – a ripe, erotic tale

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A British literary classic is soaked in blood and sex in this masterful queer, erotic, Korean adaptation by Oldboy director Park Chan-Wook. Set in a 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule, the film follows two exploited women who fall in love and wreak vengeance on the men who wronged them. As the Guardian’s four-star review said: “There are giddy pleasures to be found in this rip-roaringly ripe erotic thriller/melodrama. Inspired by Sarah Waters’s 2002 novel Fingersmith, The Handmaiden is a playfully provocative tale of seduction, desire and deceit. Slyly undermining stereotypes of fall guys and femmes fatales (this is more Bound than Basic Instinct), Park’s film takes great delight in wrong-footing its audience, peeling away layers of mesmerising misdirection with delicious cinematic sleight of hand.”

Foxtel Now

Scenes of impossible love and suspicion play out against gangland tensions in Roman Polanski’s great crime film. The entire noir – which escalates from a private investigator’s infidelity case to a grand city-wide conspiracy – is hooked to cinematic artifice and stylisation. This is not a gritty realistic view of Los Angeles, but the atmosphere of a lonely, untrustworthy city with a just-submerged criminal presence, which feels just right. Nowhere is Chinatown’s worldview more neatly encapsulated than in the response of hardboiled detective JJ Gittes (Jack Nicholson) when asked if his knife-slashed nose is hurt: “Only when I breathe.”

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino play two men on either side of the law. Both are obsessive, vengeful maniacs locked into lives of mutually assured destruction. Working from a true crime cat-and-mouse story, writer-director (and meticulous researcher) Michael Mann transforms a cliche of the crime genre – that cop and criminal are but two sides of the same coin – into a new narrative of grand, mythic and tragic proportions, in his trademark rain-slicked, neon-lit aesthetic of urban alienation.

ABC iView

This short series by Sophie Hyde (director of 52 Tuesdays) splinters a comedic family drama through six characters’ perspectives. It screened at last year’s Adelaide film festival and attracted plenty of critical praise. “There is a charming oddity to the series,” wrote Jane Howard in Guardian Australia. “Bryan Mason’s cinematography and editing is clean and crisp, casting an often calm eye over the family, mimicking the gentle stillness of Adelaide’s suburbs. Over this is laid a strange vocal soundtrack (composition by Mario Späte), perhaps of ghosts or internal thoughts, buoyant and comic ... Hyde looks at Adelaide as an insider, quiet and studied.”

Suffragettes to Social Media looks back at the history of feminist protest in Australia. Photograph: ABC TV

This series is based on a fascinating trove of interviews, documentaries and news stories plucked from the ABC’s deep, vast archive from the 1960s to today. A particular highlight is Suffragettes to Social Media, which asks three feminist thinkers to reflect on how the media covered different waves of feminism, putting the spotlight on male journalists’ clueless coverage (“Are they marching towards some sexless 1984?” remarks one.) Also noteworthy is Operation Wrap Up: Christo in Australia, revisiting the ABC’s original coverage of the world’s largest sculpture, created by Christo in 1968 on Sydney’s coastline for Kaldor Public Art Projects.

SBS On Demand

Here, a brilliant sci-fi premise is a gateway to musings on the malleability of identity. JK Simmons plays Howard, a meek, lowly bureaucrat in a spy agency who realises he has a doppelganger in a parallel universe. Having splintered from a scientific mistake at the end of the cold war, this second world houses an alternate political reality. But with multiple universes comes multiple identities, and it’s the series’ twist on nature versus nurture that pierces the deepest: Howard’s alter ego is a confident, hardened, ambitious spy, and his comatose wife also has her own dynamic dark-world version. Melding psychology with the genre of the espionage thriller, Counterpart’s what-if premise plays out in unforeseeable, emotionally insightful ways.